Looping some elements but not others

Question

I'm animating a character walking and talking. A 24-fr loopOut() walk cycle is nailed down, but the character needs to act (torso rotation, head transforms, rubberhose arms moving, lipsync) along with dialogue. How do I keep parts of them (legs, hips, body) looping while other parts of them break out of the cycle (and, ideally, enter back into the loop) at various points?

A couple of possible ways I've figured out:

Make a duplicate torso parented to the hips which I turn on when needed. This will create a heftier rig (it involves rubberhose limbs).

"Baking" the keys of the loop for the rest of the timeline. Is this possible? I worry about creating a forest of new keys for each element's transforms, making corrections to my work very hard to do.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Mylenium · Answer

You pretty much answered your own question: Yes, you break up your animation into individual segments and create custom rigs. Nobody in their right mind would even attempt to do such stuff in one stroke and a single comp. Just create the base walk cycle, add markers and then splice & dice duplicate compositions. It's done all the time even on expensive movies. You only animate what's really necessary and ditch redundant data to keep projects manageable and light in terms of data usage.

Mylenium

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